[eriknstr]

I found a video with a full play-through of King's Quest IV without commentary. The video is almost an hour long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY

Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much without any help at all.

As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short time.

The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.

[aesthetics1]

Did anyone play this game when it was out (not the recent reworked versions)? GameFAQs did not exist, nor did reddit, forums, or other places to discuss strategy and tactics for these sorts of games. There was however a hotline on the back of the instruction manual that you could call for hints - for a low low fee of course.

I remember thinking that the game designers were probably asked to make some of the puzzles frustratingly difficult so that a post-sale revenue stream could be realized.

I also remember playing through these games without the help of the tip hotline. Sharing ideas and discussing strategies with my family. It made for a very fun experience and a very rewarding feeling when you finally figured something out.

It also made for a very frustrating experience when you did something wrong or missed something along the way and had to go back to a very early save point to fix your mistake. I guess you could say that this was poor design but I still have very fond memories of the series.